Cons

Key Features

Review Price: £996.00

LCD projector

25,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio

1,800 Lumens maximum brightness

Flexible optical zoom and image shifting tools

Full HD resolution

When we looked at Epson’s EH-TW3600 back in November, we couldn’t help but moan that while it was fine so far as it went, what we really wanted to see were the new Epson Reflective LCD models that created such a stir at last year’s IFA show in Berlin. Skip forward four long months – and still there’s no sign of any Reflective LCD action. Bah.

Epson seems to feel our pain, though, and so has kindly helped us fill our Reflective LCD void with another standard LCD model: the EH-TW3200. And actually, the more we look at this initially unassuming model, the more it seems to have going for it.

The most dominant part of its appeal is its price. For we’ve found it going for under £1,000 – startlingly cheap for a projector from a pedigree brand that boasts a high contrast ratio of 25,000:1, a potent brightness of 1,800 Lumens, and reassuring three-year lamp and two-year projector warranties.

The TW3200 will satisfy anyone who measures value by sheer volume, too. For surprisingly it sports the same hulking chassis as the TW3600 and other models higher up Epson’s current range. This isn’t all good news, as we have to say we’re not great fans of Epson’s present aesthetic direction, finding it rather chunky and inelegant. But we’ll be more than happy to overlook this if the TW3200 performs as well as we’re hoping it might.

This full HD projector’s connections are perfectly respectable, too. You get the same twin HDMI support that you get with models right up to Epson’s high-end EH-TW5500, along with an S-Video input, a component video input, a D-Sub PC port, a 3.5mm mini-jack, and an RS232 control jack.

So far, we’ve found absolutely nothing that might explain how Epson could have made the TW3200 so affordable. And this theme continues as we go about setting it up, for it benefits from an excellent x2.1 optical zoom, and loads of manual image shift in both vertical and horizontal directions.